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“Experts,” he intoned, “are more and more comparing the actions of these nationalists with those who came to power in Germany in the 1930s.”

The United States and its allies had poured resources into creating a dangerous far-right force now closing in on worried citizens in the east of the country.

The authorities in Kiev slammed the government-operated Russian channels’ depictions as incitement to war this week, prompting at least one Ukrainian cable operator to stop broadcasting all three.

the Kremlin’s strategy emerged haphazardly, even misleadingly, over a tense and momentous week, as an emotional Mr. Putin acted out of what the officials described as a deep sense of betrayal and grievance, especially toward the United States and Europe.

Some of those decisions, particularly the one to invade Crimea, then took on a life of their own, analysts said, unleashing a wave of nationalistic fervor for the peninsula’s reunification with Russia that the Kremlin has so far proved unwilling, or perhaps unable, to tamp down.

The decision to invade Crimea, the officials and analysts said, was made not by the national security council but in secret among a smaller and shrinking circle of Mr. Putin’s closest and most trusted aides. The group excluded senior officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the cadre of comparatively liberal advisers who might have foreseen the economic impact and potential consequences of American and European sanctions.

Frustrated by the United States’ reluctance to sell Apaches, the Iraqis have turned to Russia, which delivered four MI-35 attack helicopters last month and planned to provide more than two dozen more. Meanwhile, cities and towns like Mosul, Haditha and Baquba that American forces fought to control during the 2007 and 2008 surge of American troops in Iraq have been the scene of bloody Qaeda attacks.

Using extortion and playing on Sunni grievances against Mr. Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government, the Qaeda affiliate is largely self-financing.

The terrorist group took advantage of the departure of American forces to rebuild its operations in Iraq and push into Syria.

13 November 2013 Last updated at 06:45 ET Share this page Email Print Share this pageShareFacebookTwitter Nigeria: US 'to name Boko Haram as a terrorist group' Boko Haram frequently clashes with the Nigerian armed forces Continue reading the main story Nigeria under attack Afraid to go to school Dead or alive Vigilante war Gunning for Boko Haram The US state department is expected to designate the Nigerian Islamist militant group, Boko Haram, as a foreign terrorist organisation.

The US state department is expected to designate the Nigerian Islamist militant group, Boko Haram, as a foreign terrorist organisation

t will become a crime under US law to provide material support to the group

As they moved through the isolated villages in this region in 1943, systematically killing men in a reprisal for an attack on a small outpost, German soldiers dragged Giannis Syngelakis’s father from his home here and shot him in the head. Within two days, more than 400 men were dead and the women left behind struggled with the monstrous task of burying so many corpses.

Mr. Syngelakis, who was 7 then, still wants payback. And in pursuing a demand for reparations from Germany, he reflects a growing movement here, fueled not just by historical grievances but also by deep resentment among his countrymen over Germany’s current power to dictate budget austerity to the fiscally crippled Greek government.

Estimates of how much money is at stake vary wildly. The government report does not cite a total. The figure most often discussed is $220 billion, an estimate for infrastructure damage alone put forward by Manolis Glezos, a member of Parliament and a former resistance fighter who is pressing for reparations. That amount equals about half the country’s debt.

Whispers of dissent in North Korea suggest waning loyalty to Kim Jong-un Though the true state of politics in Pyongyang remains opaque, sources in the capital report early signs of discontent.

Criticism of the alleged recent execution of the defence chief, Hyon Yong-chol, has been circulating in the capital, sources say, although it is impossible to verify these claims independently.

Criticism of Kim, who succeeded his father Kim Jong-il in 2011, has spread to other regions of the country, she says, with the common complaint being that the younger Kim is “even worse than his father”

Historians have increasingly written that Sherman’s plan for the systematic obliteration in late 1864 of the South’s war machine, including its transportation network and factories, was destructive but not gratuitously destructive. Instead, those experts contend, the strategy was an effective and legal application of the general’s authority and the hard-edged masterstroke necessary to break the Confederacy.

“What is really happening is that over time, the views that are out there are being challenged by historical research,” said John F. Marszalek, a Sherman biographer and the executive director of the Mississippi-based Ulysses S. Grant Association. “The facts are coming out.”

To that end, the marker in Atlanta mentions that more than 62,000 soldiers under Sherman’s command devastated “Atlanta’s industrial and business (but not residential) districts” and talks of how, “contrary to popular myth, Sherman’s troops primarily destroyed only property used for waging war — railroads, train depots, factories, cotton gins and warehouses.”

Yemen’s trajectory should not surprise anyone. It follows a familiar pattern in the Arab world, one that we are likely to see again — possibly in larger and more significant countries like Egypt.

Yemen was ruled for 33 years by a secular dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh. He ruthlessly suppressed opposition groups, especially those with a religious or sectarian orientation (in this case, the Houthis, who are Shiite). After 9/11, he cooperated wholeheartedly with Washington’s war on terrorism, which meant he got money, arms and training from the United States.

But the repression ensured that, over time, dissent would grow. Saleh’s regime faced political and military opposition, and eventually, during the Arab Spring, he was forced to resign.

For a year, Obama administration officials had been meeting in secret with Iranian counterparts, seeking to free Americans imprisoned in the Islamic republic. Finally last fall, a deal for a prisoner release seemed all but sealed.

But the Iranians arrived at the latest clandestine session in a Geneva hotel suite with a whole new proposal that insisted on the release of dozens of Iranians held in American prisons, essentially returning to initial demands that had long since been rejected.

The Americans were flabbergasted. “We’ve already talked about this,” said Brett McGurk, the lead negotiator. But the Iranians were adamant, according to American officials informed about the meeting. Something back home had changed, part of the continuing battle inside Iran over how to deal with the United States. Someone in power in Tehran, it seemed, did not want a deal after all.

The economic forces driving this year’s nomination contests have been at work for decades. Why did the dam break now?

The share of the gross national product going to labor as opposed to the share going to capital fell from 68.8 percent in 1970 to 60.7 percent by 2013

the number of manufacturing jobs dropped by 36 percent, from 19.3 million in 1979 to 12.3 million in 2015, while the population increased by 43 percent, from 225 million to 321 million.

The Elements of Trumpism

MAYBE Donald Trump is doing us a favor.

The United States has long been spared a truly authoritarian element in our politics.

The New York Times analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences to explore the leading candidate’s hold on the Republican electorate for the past five months.

The transcriptions yielded 95,000 words and several powerful patterns

The most striking hallmark was Mr. Trump’s constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery that American presidents rarely use

Growing up in the Bronx, she was unaware of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and was mostly insulated from the surge in suspicion that engulfed Muslims in the United States, the programs of police surveillance and the rise in bias attacks.

her emergence from childhood into young womanhood has coincided with the violent spread of the Islamic State and a surge in Islamophobia,

had to confront some harsh challenges of being a young Muslim in America.

Five Palestinian citizens of Israel have been arrested in recent weeks on suspicion of supporting the Islamic State

suggested that the suspects may have intended to carry out an assault, though there did not seem to be evidence that their activities had coalesced into a concrete plot

Five of those arrested have since been charged with weapons violations and support for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL

BACK in 1993, the misanthropic art critic Robert Hughes published a grumpy, entertaining book called “Culture of Complaint,” in which he predicted that America was doomed to become increasingly an “infantilized culture” of victimhood. It was a rant against what he saw as a grievance industry appearing all across the political spectrum.

the intervening two decades have made Mr. Hughes look prophetic

“Victimhood culture” has now been identified as a widening phenomenon by mainstream sociologists. And it is impossible to miss the obvious examples all around us.

“The brand of fascism was invented and exported by Italians,” Vittorio Foa, a Resistance hero and the father of Italy’s Republican Constitution, used to quip.

Using the label not only belittles past tragedies and obscures future dangers, but also indicts his supporters, who have real grievances that mainstream politicians ignore at their peril. America should tackle the demons Trump unleashes in 2016, not tar him by association with ideas and tactics he doesn’t even know about.

Italy’s fascists capitalized on similar themes in a different era of global uncertainty; in their case, it was the unemployment, veterans’ resentments, unions’ strikes, and political violence that beset the country following World War I.

a dinosaur looking up into the heavens at night, at all the twinkling stars. His smiling face utters the words: “The dot that gets bigger and bigger each night is my favorite.”

The most striking thing about Bret Stephens’s inaugural column in the New York Times was not its banal defense of the principle of scientific skepticism, but its general lameness. Rereading it this week, it is striking how modest its claims were. They essentially came to this: “Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong. Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.”

The denialists, in other words, have nothing left

Why has the Republican Party become so thoroughly corrupt? The reason is historical—it goes back many decades—and, in a way, philosophical. The party is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start.

I don’t mean the kind of corruption that regularly sends lowlifes like Rod Blagojevich, the Democratic former governor of Illinois, to prison

And I don’t just mean that the Republican Party is led by the boss of a kleptocratic family business who presides over a scandal-ridden administration

most of the ads unearthed thus far appear to have been devoted to reinforcing the American electorate’s own prejudices;

For example, YouTube videos recently uncovered by the Daily Beast feature two black men with African accents deriding Black Lives Matter and calling Clinton an “evildoer” while praising WikiLeaks. One meme posted on a Russian troll-operated Facebook account read—with a dropped article worthy of Boris Badenov—“Why do I have a gun? Because it’s easier for my family to get me out of jail than out of cemetery.”

Facebook has said the Russian-bought ads were probably viewed 10 million times; Columbia University professor Jonathan Albright has suggested that the ads actually were viewed hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, of times.